Yasumasa Morimura’s photography was heavily influenced by the instruction of Ernest Sato, a former Life magazine photographer, at Kyoto City University of Art in the 1970s. From these beginnings, steeped in the tradition of documentary photography, Morimura adapted his imagery to postmodernist concerns within the fertile, supportive context of the Kansai New Wave.¹ By 1985, he was reconstructing well-known paintings from European art history in photographic ‘tableaux vivants’, in which he placed his own image in a central or ‘starring’ role. In doing so, the artist not only critically examined the European visual arts canon, but also the notion of the ‘truth’ of photographs. Coming to worldwide attention with his participation in the 1988 Venice Biennale, Morimura has continued to explore the nature of identity and gender throughout the Heisei period.

Morimura is often cited as an exemplar of postmodern artifice and appropriation, his role-playing cast as being a critique of authenticity and originality in the mode of his American contemporary Cindy Sherman. Yet, as Andy Warhol Museum director Eric C Shiner has noted, a complication arises with Morimura’s identity as a Japanese male who inhabits Euro‑American cultural archetypes, thanks to the ongoing tension in Japanese society between the country’s distinctive culture and its wholesale adoption of Western learning and technology in its rapid modernisation from the 1860s. As Shiner states:

. . . Morimura acknowledges the sustained influence of the West through inserting his own Japanese body into the image as if to say, ‘I [Japan] will always be a part of the West because the West will always be a part of me’.²

Doublonnage (Marcel) 1988 neatly encapsulates this play of dualities, reframing them as art historical double entendre. Assuming the pose of Rrose Sélavy — Duchamp’s feminine alter ego adopted in the famous 1921 photograph by Man Ray — Morimura plays on the English idiom of ‘wearing more than one hat’. This reprisal of the dadaist’s complication of authorial identity also anticipates Morimura’s frequent reversal of gender roles — beginning with his Futago (Twins) 1988, when he appeared as both the prostitute and the maid in his recreation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia 1863. This reached a peak of sexual suggestion with a set of self-portraits as Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel in 1995–96, as part of his ‘Actresses’ series. These works presented the body as a cipher for a racial, cultural and sexual identity that is at once confused and transgressive, and identity itself simultaneously embodied and performed.

These multiple points of engagement are evident in Blinded by the light 1991, where Morimura adopts various roles within the one composition. An immediate response to this image is that the photograph is an ironic view of 1980s consumer excess. However, closer inspection reveals the artist’s layers of meaning, arrayed against a background lifted from Pieter Bruegel’s 1568 painting, Parable of the blind. Each of the protagonists (played by the artist himself) is blinded or masked by an element of his/her personal paraphernalia: a baby is weighed down by a surfeit of lacy clothing, an artist by his tools of trade, a soldier with a pair of hand grenades in lieu of field glasses, and, most conspicuously, a flamboyant parody of a Ginza shopper outfitted in designer garb, weighed down with an abundance of jewellery and carry bags. One of these bags is labelled Morimura, lending credence to the idea that this work is a self-referential critique of the commodification of art and of the successful artist as an identifiable ‘personality’. Here, Yasumasa Morimura offers his own body as a surface for inscribing and absorbing tensions specific to the contemporary Japanese experience.

Endnotes

1. The Kansai New Wave, which embraced popular culture and everyday life as sources of inspiration for art-making, emerged in the 1980s in western Japan.
2. Eric C Shiner, ‘Fashion alters, performance factors and pop cells’, in J Thomas Rimer (ed.), Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts 1868–2000, University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2012, p.175.